How to turn a $400 Tivo into a paperweight in four easy steps

Step 1
purchase a Tivo. Any Circuit City will carry one.
Step 2
configure your Tivo. This will take about three hours because the designers made some incorrect assumptions.
Step 3
Do not subscribe to the service.
Step 4
do a full system reset (you might have to wait till the initial 14 days of program information are obsolete).
Congratulations, your Tivo is now a $400 paperweight.

my story

I wanted a "digital" VCR. Tivo sounded good. They say "your tivo will have limited functionality if you do not subscribe to the service".

Big deal. I do not need program names. I can program the whole thing by time and channel. That is what I do with my VCR.

When I brought the unit home I went through the setup. About 5 minutes into the setup I discovered they did not list my cable provider. Like I care. Unfortunately there seemed to be no way to skip that step so I called tech support.

They told me to just pick any provider so I could complete the setup and start using my unit. They would add my provider later.

I picked one at random and then waited 3 hours while it downloaded and decoded the programming info. Geez. That is a hell of a long time to wait while it downloads a 14 day supply of totally wrong and useless information.

For the next 14 days I was in heaven. I used the klunky interface to program my favorite shows by channel number and time. It came to about 6 hours of TV per day. When I came home I had anywhere from 2-4 hours of TV to watch (depending on the quantity of reruns). I did not have to watch any commercials. I could skip reruns with 4 button clicks.

On the other hand the Thumbs Up and Thumbs Down were useless because the channel information was entirely wrong so there was no point on giving "Three's Company" a thumbs up when I was actually watching "Gundam Wing". This did not really concern me at all. I did not intend to subscribe to Tivo.

About the time I ran out of (incorrect) channel information I got an email from Tivo telling me they had added my cable provider and I should repeat Guided Setup. Well, Guided Setup wanted to call Tivo, and since I had never subscribed to the service it would not let me download any more information. The customer service rep suggested I do a full system reset. This took several minutes (evidently it wipes the hard drive or something) and then it rebooted.

I tried to set my cable provider, but there were no cable providers listed. I could not complete Guided Setup because that required a phone call to Tivo and I did not subscribe to the service. I pressed the Live TV button. The unit crashed and rebooted.

The unit is now entirely useless!

When they say ``Without the TiVo Service the receiver can perform limited functions'' they are not kidding. I called their tech support again and got a rep who explained that the previous rep had steered me wrong. No duh!

He said I could subscribe to the service, download the info, and then cancel, but do I really want to do that every time I move to a new zip code, every time there's a bug fix (and they need quite a few, believe me), or every time the clock drifts out of sync? I don't think so. I think I will return my Tivo and wait for somebody to create a real random-access VCR that is not crippled by design.

The Moral

If you are going to buy the Tivo, plan on buying the $200 lifetime service. The unit's useful lifetime will be uncertain if you do not.

Some day the Tivo service will be end-of-lifed (like the DIVX service was) and if there are any machines still in the field, they will continue on in a mindless state until one day they need to have a full system reset, and then they'll become paperweights too. The designers did not intend this to be a standalone digital VCR and it shows.

There is no way to set the channel names. There is no way to set the clock. The time&channel programming method is clunky.

Wait for a real digital VCR. One that doesn't require an outside service, or has open programming specs so you can provide the service with your own computer.


[RF]